The Surprising Discovery When We Audited Our Employees Time

Turns out the problem was us.

There came a time in our school’s evolution when we realized we needed to perform an audit on how our staff spent their time at work.

What were the things that consumed most of their time?

What took longer than it should?

What were they doing (or expected to do) that sat outside their job descriptions?

So where did we begin?

We listened. We interviewed a stack of people from a range of different positions across the organization. We asked them lots of questions, and we drilled down into the details. We filled up spreadsheets and refined and reworked them.

We tried to avoid too much anecdotal commentary or pre-conceived notions of what the issues were.

We pulled out the job descriptions to identify task lists and major responsibilities for each position.

We asked questions like:

How much time do you spend on checking email?

How much time do you spend calling parents?

How much time do you spend on lesson preparation?

What else takes up your time?

You get the idea.

Not only did we ask ‘what’, but we also asked ‘when’, and ‘how. For example, ‘how much time do you spend on email per day’, was followed up with, ‘when do you check email’, and ‘how do you check email’?

We also asked, ‘how can we do better?’

After speaking with our teams, we also did some digging behind the scenes. We analyzed emails, web statistics, and more. We gave people surveys.

And then we crunched the numbers.

What did we find?

Two major findings were immediately obvious:

Related posts:

School education says absolutely nothing about whether you will be successful in professional life or not. Of course, with a good education, you have better opportunities to get a management position…

COVID has changed life as we know it, forcing people to adopt new lifestyles, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. While this level of disruption is unparalleled for many of us, it is also highly…